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So, how's that whole Elon free speech Twitter thing going? Turns out, not great. An article from Mike Masnick over at TechDirt has the details. Basically, back in November, shortly after Elon finished buying Twitter, he noted his belief in free speech was so strong it extended even to leaving up the Twitter account @elonjet. For those who don't know the @elonjet Twitter account used publicly available data to Tweet whenever Elon's private plane flew somewhere. Elon tweeted:
The man behind the account, Jack Sweeney, also operated a bunch of other plane tracker accounts for other billionaires (including Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and various Russian oligarchs). As of today it seems the @elonjet Twitter account, along with all the other plane trackers and even Sweeney's personal account, have been suspended. Apparently this suspension is pursuant to a new Twitter rule about sharing personal information:
It took a whole month for Elon to craft a policy to ban the account he specifically said he wouldn't ban due to his commitment to free speech. So much for the idea that the limits of Twitter moderation would be anything like "only illegal speech." It also seems (according to the TechDirt article, and I tried this myself) that you can't even tweet links to @elonjet accounts on other platforms (like Facebook or Instagram). Amusingly Elon's original tweet from November now has a Community Note on it noting what the account that was being mentioned in the tweet was and the fact that it's banned.
Twitter files dump about the internal deliberations on how this policy change and these bans came about when?
ETA:
Seems @elonjet was unsuspended. Apparently the new policy requires "slight" (no word on how long that is) delay before posting info. Although, at the time of this edit the account appears to be suspended again. Link.
ETA2:
Elon now claiming that legal action is being taken against Sweeney. Would love to hear what legal action he's alledgedly taking.
I sort of vaguely was aware of this story but my initial read was skepticism because it seemed just way too blatant. In case anyone is curious about my thought process, I wondered whether Sweeney either took down his own account, or intentionally got his account suspended some other way (the publicity motive seemed plausible to me). But it does appear to be true that Twitter indeed updated their terms of service specifically to prohibit sharing live location information. I find all this confusing because Musk's tweet about his commitment to not banning Sweeney's account still hasn't been deleted. I can understand Musk being annoyed at Sweeney's account, but this seems like a needlessly pointless way to burn credibility, and just weird and erratic behavior from Musk. He's the face of a $44 billion company, what exactly is the end game here? One last thing that remains curious to me is why would facebook and instagram also prevent people from sharing the elonjet account? It doesn't make sense that they would want to carry water for Musk, so I wonder if something else is going on.
When Musk first took over Twitter, this was my prediction:
I didn't expect a speedrun
My guess is that initially (in the heady days when he was going to buy Twitter and "save" it) Musk was willing to bite the bullet and say "Yeah, even the asshole who's electronically stalking me, I'll prove my commitment to my principles by not banning him."
What probably happened was not so much that Musk suddenly did a 180 and decided to ban the guy who was an irritant to him personally, but once he dug into how Twitter moderation did (and didn't work), and also talked to lawyers, he had to start revising his ideas of what should and shouldn't be allowed. And if you can track a billionaire's travel itinerary and current location, why can't you do that to anyone you don't happen to like?
Whether he came down on the right side of "free speech," I don't know, and it will depend a lot on how evenly this rule gets enforced.
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